new-york-city

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

I said, "It really didn't feel like a choice. Where else is there to go?

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.

New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

New York is a sucked orange.

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

New York is a granite beehive, where people jostle and whir like molecules in an overheated jar. Houston is six suburbs in search of a center.

Vulgar of manner, overfed,Overdressed and underbred;Heartless, Godless, hell's delight,Rude by day and lewd by night_Crazed with avarice, lust and rum,New York, thy name's delirium.

New York is large, glamorous, easy-going, kindly and incurious, but above all it is a crucible - because it is large enough to be incurious.

If this fails to convince, I being out my secret weapon, announcing with portentous deliberation that Barbara. Damn. Walters. Does. Not. Drive. Heard of her?This sort of accusatory conversion of course almost never goes down with native New Yorkers, people who, like Barbara Walters, live in that barbaric third world country that is Manhattan, and thus have yet to hear of newfangled American Advances like automobiles, happiness, and yards.

I'd known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would just be an intermission. I'd spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibility place that you could ever live; a place where if you really wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I'd be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist. And I'd turned out to be right.

And it was to this city, whenever I went home, that I always knew I must return, for it was mistress of one's wildest hopes, protector of one's deepest privacies. It was half insane with its noise, violence, and decay, but it gave one the tender security of fulfillment. On winter afternoons, from my office, there were sunsets across Manhattan when the smog itself shimmered and glowed_ Despite its difficulties, which become more obvious all the time, one was constantly put to the test by this city, which finally came down to its people; no other place in America had quite such people and they would not allow you to go stale; in the end they were its triumph and its reward.

New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle;Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness_.There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory inTheir skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.